As a leader of a college judged outstanding by Ofsted, I was recently asked what pressures I faced from the structural changes to education and the harsh economic climate.

David Lewis College is one of 60 independent specialist colleges (ISCs) in the UK providing day and residential FE to around 3,000 students with a wide range of disabilities and challenging behaviours.

Students attend ISCs when all other options have been exhausted or shown not to be appropriate.

Our whole team — teachers, learning assistants, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, psychologists and a range of medical clinicians — are involved in planning, delivering and evaluating the impact of our students’ learning.

This multidisciplinary approach undoubtedly pays dividends as we manage, very successfully, our students’ learning, medical conditions and complex behaviours.

But it is obviously resource-intensive and comes at a cost. Most students require full-time one-to-one support from a learning assistant.

We feel it is an investment that is fair, proportionate and well worth making. It benefits not only our young people and their families but, ultimately, all of society by developing essential daily living skills and reducing lifetime NHS costs through improving the long-term prognosis of adults with complex medical needs.

How disappointing it was, then, to hear recently from one local authority commissioner that it does not want to pay for a “Rolls-Royce, when a Mini would do”.

At David Lewis we have had to manage cost carefully, having received no inflationary increase in funding for many years.

We believe that we offer exceptional value for money – a balance between quality and cost. But our definition of value is not one always shared by our partners. Many see only the cheapest option.

Under the guise of “austerity” are we starting to see a race to the bottom where the cheapest option for a local authority equates to the best option for a young learner?

Ultimately, is this how we want to provide further education for some of the most vulnerable young people?

The principal challenge that I face is trying to plan for the future of all our students against a background of change and what appears to be a developing reluctance by some local authorities to fund the FE of young people with a wide range of disabilities.

This creates uncertainty — for vulnerable young people and their families who have no idea whether they will be attending college in September or not, for ISC managers who do not know how many students to plan for, and for teachers and specialist support staff who do not know if they’ll have a job.

The new Children and Families Bill, the devolution of funding and the potential for every local authority to set its own funding criteria and different information and data in different forms, makes things far more complicated than they need to be.

It is, of course, for society to decide what level of investment, if any, we are prepared to make in our most vulnerable young people’s FE.

We then could plan in a coherent way, maximising the benefits that we can offer our vulnerable young learners and matching the available funding.

Local authorities have had at least 19 years to work with parents, to plan and decide whether a student will benefit from FE at an ISC and to budget for the costs. There should be no surprises and no uncertainty.

Billy McInally, director of education, David Lewis College, Cheshire

Barclays is determined that there should be more apprenticeships and that young people have the skills they need to be successful in work, writes Lynne Atkin.

Figures for the early part of 2012 suggest that the number of 16 to 18-year-olds entering apprenticeships is declining compared with the same time last year.

These figures highlight the ongoing challenge that school-leavers face when they move into the world of work, particularly as apprenticeships become more popular and more competitive.

While it’s great news that apprenticeships are on the rise overall, it’s vital that employers create opportunities for younger apprentices too.

From the employer’s perspective, the message we hear over and over again is that the barrier to hiring young people directly from school is their relative lack of skills and understanding of the workplace — three-quarters of employers have told us that school-leavers’ awareness of the business world is either poor or very poor.

But beneath this figure is a strong appetite to do more to prepare young people for the workplace.

Small businesses, however, are almost excluded from this for two reasons: the difficulty of establishing a relationship with a school and a cultural bias that stops students considering start-up and small businesses as attractive employers.

The truth is that employers can do a lot more to address the skills gap between school and work through initiatives such as offering work experience and working with training providers.

With training in essential workplace skills, and help navigating career options, school-leavers will stand a much better chance of achieving their job aspirations. Indeed, research from the Education and Employers Taskforce has found that young people who have skills training — such as CV writing or work experience — on average earn up to 18 per cent more than those without.

Barclays’ apprenticeship programme addresses the issue by including pre-apprenticeship training to ensure candidates are ready for their role from day one.

This must be followed up by on-the-job industry-specific training to prepare the recruit for a full-time job at the end of the apprenticeship.

This requires real investment, and the best way to maximise this investment is to ensure that there is a full-time job ready when the apprentice has reached the required skill level.

Recognising the appetite among smaller businesses for the structures and support to offer apprenticeships, we’ve recently launched the Bridges into Work programme, which aims to support employers across a broad spectrum of industries to create 10,000 apprenticeships by 2015.

But we realise that more has to be done if 16 to 18-year-olds are going to compete with their older, more experienced, counterparts.

To help build these foundations we’ve also launched LifeSkills, a curriculum-linked programme that helps young people in school develop the skills they need to be successful in work.

We’re bringing together schools, young people and local businesses with the goal of equipping one million young people by 2015 with the skills they need to be successful in the workplace. This includes creating 50,000 work experience opportunities this year alone.

I’m delighted that companies including McDonalds, Waitrose, ISS and Centrica, are already on board as partners, and we’d like to encourage businesses of all sizes to do the same, sign up and offer work experience.

When the age of participation is raised later this year, employers will have a real opportunity to help reduce strain on the FE system while developing their talent pools.

We recognise real change cannot be achieved by one party alone, which is why we’re committed to doing all we can and creating more ways for businesses to get involved.

Lynne Atkin, HR director, Barclays Retail and Business Bank

Establishing and maintaining structural and cultural change in FE is a huge task, a task that needs not only vision but will — and that will is lacking. We have always had the sufficient but not the necessary conditions for success.

It is why hours of Institute for Learning professional development were never used to innovate, to develop communities of practice, to foster new relations with business and employers.

It is why the Pathfinder Projects shone like beacons and then were quenched as the funding dried up; why the ambitions of the 2001 regulations and the firmer ambitions set out in the 2007 regulations are now threatened with full revocation.

When the licence to practise was introduced (QTLS) in 2007, it established a concrete sense of what ‘professionalism’ might mean.

Autonomous CPD (mutually beneficial to employers, learners, staff), an entitlement to have time for that CPD, a sense that professionalism meant the upkeep of certain standards and values, and that employers had to have due regard for these professional ambitions meant a ‘professional space’ had been cleared and could be developed.

But the sector’s illusory centre meant that it lacked the necessary conditions for such change.

Incorporation has constructed an image of coherence that has no accountability to anything but each corporation. This is the governance challenge to the newly established Education Training Foundation (aka FE Guild).

The critical juncture teaching staff face is deregulation of the 2007 Workforce Regulations, ironically given in the Learning and Skills Improvement Service guidance on the new qualifications (an admirable example of how we have moved from Cinderella to Alice in Wonderland).

While ATL is, and will be, consistently positive in its endeavours to improve the professional lot of our members, we are not reeds in the wind. We need to ask at this juncture: whither professionalism?

Can professionalism in FE survive increasingly fragmenting employers’ and private interests in the governance of the sector, and in the post-19 funding changes?

Is not the fitness of qualifications, teacher standards, curriculum design, pedagogy, research, the preserve of a particular group of professionals: lecturers? Just as accounts, marketing, income generation, premises and HR belong to another occupational sphere: business leadership?

Is there not sense in seeking the support and expertise of teacher trainers in universities, researchers and experts in education and skills policy to help our policy formation?

What we are shaping in post-16 education is what Ken Spours of the Institute of Education describes as an ‘outlier’ status. Not European, not Scandinavian, not American, certainly not Welsh or Scottish.

In fact, some argue we are not even on the map: we don’t have a coherent sector at all from a European perspective. (Test: try to define the post-16 sector to somebody who does not know it.)

Deregulation will introduce a race to the bottom, and further hinder our ability to engage with other labour markets and manufacturing standards. So, no matter how well meaning some college principals are, they are in a sector that has been for too long shaped by following funding and, for the past 20 years, constructing a perverse corporate ethos. Policy design and execution have never been properly coupled together.

This has now reached an overly critical point with an employer-led sector body (ETF) affirming government ideology to deregulate.

And in September, we return to the years before 2001 when evidence and argument were building up that we needed standards and initial teacher training for FE staff… but that’s yet another story.

So it’s ‘back to the future’. We have to solve the same problem again, but in a different way.

Norman Crowther, national official for post-16 education at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers

Several past WorldSkills UK competitors were among the gold medal winners at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, writes Joseph Massie.

The Chelsea Flower Show celebrated its centenary this year, but 2013 should also be remembered for the high numbers of WorldSkills UK alumni taking part in the annual event.

I was competing for RHS Young Florist of the Year but there were five alumni competing in the florist categories alone — and three of us took home a gold medal.

Keith Chapman MBE (Team UK, 2007) kept up the representation in garden design, working with landscape architect Chris Beardshaw to create the gold medal winner, The Arthritis Research UK Garden. Finally, Natalie Stanyer (Team UK, 2007) worked on Interflora’s exhibit that commemorated its 90th anniversary.

While the representation is impressive, you simply can’t ignore the number of gold medals won by the alumni. Having competed at RHS Chelsea for the past five years, I know that winning a medal of any kind at an RHS Show is no easy feat. It takes dedication, hard work and determination, traits that are typical of a WorldSkills finalist and embedded in us as we started on our competition journey.

It is a huge honour to secure a place in the team that represents the UK at WorldSkills. We all drove ourselves to the limits of perfection in our individual skills.

A training programme for a Team UK member, who will compete internationally, typically lasts two years, focusing on taking the young person beyond what they think they are capable of. I was coached by the top vocational teachers and trained alongside the most gifted individuals in the industry from all over the world. I know just how hard it is and that it impacts on every aspect of your life, but competing has fast-forwarded our careers and put us years ahead of our peers.

At the end of last year, I met First Lady Michelle Obama when I was invited to dress the White House for the holiday season — something that would never have happened if I hadn’t taken part in WorldSkills. Competing raised my profile in the sector and gave me the confidence to launch my own business.

Adam Smith, a team mate at WorldSkills Calgary 2009, who represented the UK in cooking and who was until recently premier sous chef at The Ritz, has said that his competition training put him five years ahead of his work peers.

The training that I got before Calgary has made me determined to stay involved with the programme. I am now responsible for helping to train future Team UK members in floristry.

I’m always impressed that whatever stage the competitor is at, he or she always has the same determination and dedication that I had and still have as I continue to compete in competitions all over the world. Working with Chloe Woolf, who will represent the UK in floristry at WorldSkills Leipzig in July, has reconfirmed how hungry the young team is for success.

The WorldSkills programme deserves much wider understanding and appreciation. Members of this year’s and future squad and teams will continue to grow and mature through the experience. You only have to look at the results table at this year’s Chelsea Show for proof.

Joseph Massie, director and proprietor, Joseph Massie Creative, squad and Team UK training team (floristry), and gold medallist, RHS Chelsea Young Florist of the Year, 2013

The FE sector and business are failing to lay the foundations for tomorrow’s innovative workforce, says Sandra O’Neill.

Too many young people are leaving college without the knowledge, awareness and aptitude for business and entrepreneurialism that is vital to employers and to creating the future business leaders that our economy needs.

As the first cohort of students come to the end of the first year of a university education that will set them back little short of £9,000 a year, it is no surprise that applications for places have begun to dip.

Most of those who do graduate from an English university in two years’ time will have debts of £40,000 or more.

So, with larger numbers of young people than ever leaving college to take their chances in the jobs market, it becomes increasingly vital that we address the failure of a system that does not value, and fails to nurture, innovation, entrepreneurialism and employability.

The 250,000 16 to 24-year-olds who have been out of work for a year, along with the one-in-five young people currently unemployed, are a stark reminder of the urgency of the situation.
It’s an issue in which, as a business adviser and accountant, Grant Thornton takes a keen interest.

A report we commissioned in 2010 found that the lack of collaboration between business and education is hampering the UK’s ability to compete globally when it comes to innovation and entrepreneurship.
And it’s having an equally profound and negative impact on young people’s life chances as they emerge from education ill equipped and ill-informed about business.

In Yorkshire we are piloting a scheme — Educate to Innovate — that brings colleges, schools and businesses together with the aim of instilling in young people an interest and an enthusiasm for business that’s not being provided by the exam results-orientated curriculum of A-levels and BTec.

We have discovered a synergy and an energy between young people — full of curiosity and brimming with new ideas — and entrepreneurs, whose lifeblood is new ideas and innovation.

The Umph! business and enterprise competition we hold every summer brings 16 to 19-year-olds from across Yorkshire together with some of the region’s most inspiring entrepreneurs.

The results and feedback from the entrepreneurs, the students and their teachers are electric. Last year, students’ comments ranged from “totally awesome and inspiring” to “it gave me my first proper insight into what business is actually all about, and helped me to understand that it was something I could actually do”.

Yet despite the resoundingly positive feedback, most FE students have limited chances to meet and learn from business people.

Colleges are channelled relentlessly by results-orientated league tables and the constricting demands of academic achievement.

More enlightened colleges, or those with the resources to do so, employ a business liaison officer to create opportunities for businesses to work more closely with their college.

But such roles are few and far between, and most young people continue to leave education with little or no understanding of the skills needed for work, let alone those required to make it as an entrepreneur.

Our Educate to Innovate programme barely scratches the surface, but it does make it clear that there needs to be a change of attitude in colleges and schools across the country, with the crucial participation of business.

If we do nothing, we risk short-changing the workforce of tomorrow, and severely hampering the British economy in the process.

Sandra O’Neill, head of business development at Grant Thornton, Yorkshire